This started asa prayer request.
The friendships go back to Seattle Pacific University in the 1970s. Decades later, George Todd reconnected with Gordy and Cat Wollan through a Zoom Bible study. More than twenty years ago, Cat had started writing to an inmate in Florida named Gary Farrington. Over time that correspondence became family. Gary calls Cat his "mom" and Gordy his "dad."
At one point, Gordy asked the group to pray for their "son" in prison. George started asking questions. Those questions led to this foundation. George's daughter Natalie built the strategy, the technology, and the storytelling around it.
What we do.
The Gary Project is a Christian ministry in Florida, focused on recidivism and rehabilitation. Everything grows from one root, a life remade by the grace of Jesus Christ, and it takes three forms.
The ministry inside. Behind the razor wire, Gary pastors men the world gave up on. He has planted two churches inside Florida prisons, at Hardee and at Hamilton, and a third is being planted now by a man he mentored. He leads weekly chapel and has baptized hundreds. We help carry that teaching to chaplains and men in other prisons Gary will never reach in person.
Gary's testimony, carried to the young. We are telling Gary's story in his own voice, in film and in writing, and building the partnerships to carry it into juvenile halls and youth ministries, so a boy standing where Gary once stood hears it before he ever starts down the same road.
The safety net on the outside. A man can be made new in a cell and still walk out into nothing. We stand behind the faith-based re-entry homes that catch him, like Trinity Reentry Center, and we are working to strengthen that whole field so no changed man walks out alone.
The people
Gary Lee Farrington Jr.
The reason we started. Ordained minister and church planter who has baptized hundreds of men inside the Florida DOC.
George Todd
Foundation President. "My life has followed a simple path: learn, earn, and give."
Natalie Todd
Project Director. Strategy, story, and operations.
Cat and Gordy Wollan
Gary's advocates for more than twenty years, and family to him through his whole incarceration.
On paper.
| Legal entity | Gary Lee Farrington Jr. Foundation Inc, doing business as The Gary Project. Incorporated in Florida. |
| Status | 501(c)(3) public charity. IRS determination August 21, 2025; effective date of exemption April 15, 2025. EIN 33-4248520. |
| Leadership | George Todd, Foundation President. Natalie Todd, Project Director. |
| Purpose | Fundraising, advocacy, and outreach for the ministry, and for the re-entry and prevention work it is building. |
About the names.
The foundation carries Gary's name because his story opened the door to everything it is building. Gary's own vision goes further: he wants his future foundation to carry the name of Josephine Nuvolone, the woman whose death he caused, as a permanent way of owning what he did. That is his own idea, in his own words.